


feign awake

by kiiouex



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Character Death, M/M, Mild Kavinsky, POV Second Person, kind of, mild violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-15
Updated: 2016-03-15
Packaged: 2018-05-26 21:34:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6256711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That makes him a forgery, and your stomach turns, sick and hot. However long it’s been that you didn’t know is time that Kavinsky <i>did</i>. He must have been laughing at you. He must have been absolutely fucking delighted to know that the centre of your universe was his creation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	feign awake

**Author's Note:**

> My beloved [telekinesiskid](http://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid) came up with the idea for this and then suddenly I forgot everything else I was planning to do tonight :^) she beta'd too, solid gold star wife.

The Camaro is too slow. You crush the pedal uselessly flat against the rubber matting, like you can threaten the engine to go faster with force, but it doesn’t work. You are in a bellowing, orange missile, country road shooting away under your headlights, gone as soon as you’ve seen it, and it’s still not fast enough. Outside, the night is a tense, held breath, uselessly still.

Beside you, Gansey shifts in the passenger seat, jolting as the Pig hits a bump but not stirring. It doesn’t stop you from looking over at him every time the car shudders, like each rattle of the engine could be the one to wake him. None are. His glasses are sliding down his nose and his head is pressed flat against the window, hair plastered messily against his forehead. The rise of his chest is gentle, the fall is calm. A picture of peace, sleep for a king, well-earned.

It’s hard to focus on driving, even in a straight line where you just need to keep your fingers hooked around the wheel and your foot pressing the pedal through the floor. You feel consumed by an echoing combustion, your heart blown to nothing, a grasping void in its place. The Camaro howls for you, joyless, and carries you on.

You want to say that he’ll be fine, but you’re not a liar.

 

It had all happened at the same time, and it had all been too much. Kavinsky and then a corpse, Matthew in your arms and a decade of nightmares realised and released all at once. You had wanted to leave everything else to everyone else, because you had done _enough_ , because you had your brother clasped in shaking hands and surely that was the only thing that mattered. Without Kavinsky, it didn’t seem like there could be trouble left for you, like it was finally safe to exhale.

You watched one of the cars crash from over Matthew’s golden curls and knew the meaning, Kavinsky’s kingdom collapsing without him, Prokopenko a puppet with no one left to pull his strings. You’d thought _of_ him, in the vaguest of ways, and then Blue started screaming for you, frantic like you hadn’t heard her before.

Gansey lay unconscious at her feet.

Too many times that night, time stopped working. You knew what you’d find before you’d reached him, before you pressed the back of your hand to his lips and felt the warmth of his breath, felt his pulse through his neck steady and even. As though he had just fallen asleep; as though with fire and thunder quaking through the fairground, Gansey had decided to drop to the ground for a nap. You’d wanted to accuse him of it, but your mouth was too dry.

“Ronan,” Blue whispered from miles away, “Is he..?”

You slapped Gansey across the face, left his cheek glowing red. He didn’t stir. Everything precious to you spilled like water in cupped hands, like you can’t have everything at once. Matthew returned. Gansey gone. You wanted to scream and howl and break all the bones in your hand against the strip, but there wouldn’t have been anyone to stop you, no one to catch your wrist and save you from incineration.

Blue whispered, “Cabeswater,” and you moved, Gansey’s limp body pressed tight against your chest, the Camaro a beacon, more orange than the flames. You’d thought that it’s possible and if it’s _possible_ then you needed to press back against everything threatening to crash down on you. Blue took Matthew away, and you slid Gansey carefully into the passenger side, tearing around the car to grab the wheel.

Even though he slept, you felt like urgency was required, like every second saved would help him. Like resuscitation.

 

There are too many thoughts crawling through your mind when you reach the outskirts of the woods, all of them eating at you. One worms through your brain, huge and black and inescapable; you don’t _know_ when it happened. Your world shattered days, weeks, months ago, and you didn’t notice. An explosion in a distant galaxy, the debris only reaching you now, the smallest pieces punching holes right through you. The largest leaves a crater.

Maybe Richard Gansey the Third was too wonderful to have ever been real. It’s a nail driven through the back of your skull, the idea of him effervescent and eccentric and imagined. But Kavinsky could never have created something so untarnished.

That makes him a forgery, and your stomach turns, sick and hot. However long it’s been that you didn’t know is time that Kavinsky _did_. He must have been laughing at you. He must have been absolutely fucking delighted to know that the centre of your universe was his creation. You think it’s lucky for him that he’s put himself out of vengeance’s reach.

You smash your way through the bracken to Cabeswater, letting the underbrush leave long stinging lashes against your skin, turning Gansey’s head against your chest to spare him. The woods lighten when you want them to, turning pink with dawn, a time for waking. You lay Gansey down by the stream that had first enchanted him, trying not to think of him so bright and alive, trying not to wonder if even back then he’d been alive.

Adam reset the breaker, Cabeswater should be crackling, should have enough to spare for the first miracle you’ve ever actively wanted. You are not much of an incredible creature if you can’t even manage this for him. But you can feel it; Cabeswater alive, aglow, _grateful_.

 Gansey wakes like he was never asleep, too fluid, and his smile is a sunrise. Something in you unwinds, and something else holds hesitantly taut. You ask him, “Gansey?” because he still doesn’t feel possible.

“Ronan,” he answers, pleasantly. It settles into him a moment later, though. The dewy grass beneath him, the dimming panic wide in your eyes, the fact that, for the better part of an hour, he ceased to be. The smile sinks until it’s just an attempt, probably for your benefit, and you can see frantic consequences ricochet around his head. He touches his temple in the way he does when he’s thinking, and all he comes out with is, “Oh.”

Your chest is tight enough to snap. Your hand finds the soft skin of his neck to take his pulse again, and it’s erratic and alive beneath your fingertips. You say, “ _Kavinsky_ ,” but the name is poison and tastes too poor on your lips, so you spit it away. Instead, you ask what you can’t stand to hear answered; “Didn’t you _know?_ ”

His gaze shifts guilty, an expression you recognize from too many conversations he didn’t want to have, and he confesses, “I wasn’t… different. So, I didn’t think I had to act differently.”

The most impossible thing is him coming out of Kavinsky’s head in one piece. But if anyone’s capable of such a wonder, it would be Gansey; he’s more a miracle than you now. A stubborn, ridiculous one. Your hand finds his and he twines his fingers between yours. He was warm when he was sleeping, so the heat means nothing, but the absent stroke of his thumb against yours is the world. You choke out the second question that needs to be asked: “How long?”

He’s quiet for a conspicuous breath, and you wonder if he’s having to measure the time, too large a tally, and you brace yourself for the answer with your forehead against his. “I went to talk to him,” Gansey replies eventually, like he’s telling you a story about a very distant friend, “a few weeks ago. He didn’t like what I had to say.”

You think _weeks_ and recoil, and then you think _talk_ and try to imagine what Gansey might have said to upset Kavinsky so badly, try to imagine any topic that doesn’t end up pointing at you. You hiss out, “Fuck,” and, “You shouldn’t have,” and feel black claws working their way up your insides.

“I needed to,” Gansey tells you. “I just really didn’t think he’d take it so poorly. Or maybe, because he knew there wouldn’t be consequences…” he trails off, retreating to the memory of the second time he died.

He touches his temple in the way Noah touches his cheek.

Everything in you drops away. You look at Gansey’s finger pressed against his head, imagine a gun’s black barrel in its place. You don’t know how you’re going to survive this.

You didn’t notice your grip on his hand going loose, but Gansey abruptly tightens his hold on you, a hard press of comfort. When he speaks again, it’s in his most concrete tone, the one reserved for problems newly identified and in need of solving. He says, “Your experiments, to wake the creatures in the Barns. Do you think you’re making progress?”

He is offering you an anchor, and you snatch for it. “ _Yes_ ,” you say immediately, “I’ve been bringing out useless things but they’re getting more potent. That’s what you like, isn’t it?”

“Get Adam and Blue to help,” he advises. “Tell the school I’m on a trip. If anyone asks, I’m doing a ‘no-phones’ technology cleanse.”

You shouldn’t be surprised. Death must really lose its edge after the first time, but you still laugh, hoarse and brief, at the hunt for Glendower taking a quick detour to fix Gansey’s little ‘non-existence’ problem. His thumb still makes smooth circles on the back of your hand, and it’s terrible, how he always knows how to steady you, how much you need him to. You force it out as a joke; “I suppose you’re going to want me to sleep a lot, keep you company?”

“You could bring me books,” he says, and you don’t know if he’s serious, but you know he’s _normal_ and that is enough of a wonder on its own.

You won’t let him become the second king asleep on the ley line, and you won’t let Kavinsky leave such a miserable legacy behind. Gansey is an impossible thing, impossibly alive, and all you know is miracles.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, I'd love to know what you thought!! I also have a [tumblr](http://kiiouex.tumblr.com/) :V


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